Now, to be sure, the Silver Lake offer is nowhere near as good as the Microsoft one the Board sniffed at three years ago. It also isn't an "exit." For the offer to work for shareholders and employees, Silver Lake's new board will have to sell off Yahoo's Asian assets and then fix Yahoo's core business. The former will require complicated deal-making and the latter, likely, several years of hard work.

If Yahoo's Board could fix Yahoo themselves, the best course of action would be for them to just fix it.

But by canning the CEO, putting the company into purgatory, and seeking the help of anyone willing to offer it, the Board has already basically admitted that it has no idea how to fix Yahoo.

(The Board has also already been trying to fix the company for 5-10 years, to no avail).

So that leaves the Silver Lake offer, a similar offer from another private-equity firm called TPG, and an offer for Yahoo's Asian assets from Alibaba and Softbank.

But Yahoo's Board is also once again dumbfounding people familiar with the situation with its hemming and hawing and seeming inability to agree on anything.

Yahoo's Board, for example, still reportedly can't agree whether the company is a "media company" or a "products company."

(The answer is that Yahoo is a company whose product is a combination of media and technology. The sooner the company embraces THAT, unifies its mission, and stops arguing about what label to place on itself, the better.)

And now, reportedly, after asking for help and offers from anyone who will give them, Yahoo's Board is suddenly refusing to allow its new potential investors to choose its new CEO. This is mystifying. If the Board wants to pick Yahoo's new CEO, the Board should just pick Yahoo's CEO and dispense with all this crazy deal-making. But now, having asked for help gotten a decent offer on the table, the Board seems to be trying to hang on to control.

One thing all the board members presumably know is that, if the Board doesn't do something, they'll face a proxy fight next spring. They might win the proxy fight, but it won't be a fun experience. And, in the meantime, the company is in purgatory.

(Here it must be said that Yahoo's interim CEO Tim Morse appears to be doing a yeoman's job of making quick decisions and providing a steady hand on the tiller. Tim has one of the most thankless jobs imaginable--babysitting the company while the board deliberates about what to do with it--but he seems to be doing it well.)

Last time the Yahoo Board was in a situation like this, you will painfully recall, the Board hemmed and hawed and deliberated until the party on the other side of the transaction got disgusted and walked. (Steve Ballmer).

That outcome was disastrous for the company. And Yahoo has been deteriorating ever since.

And now there's another offer on the table.

And there are other impatient and presumably disgusted people on the other side of it.

And these people may not, actually, be willing to sit around waiting until hell freezes over for Yahoo's Board to make a decision.

These people, at any moment, might decide that life's just too short, and take their offer off the table.

At which point whatever negotiating leverage Yahoo's Board still has will go "poof."

We hope this won't happen. We hope Yahoo's Board will quickly make a strong, clear decision that will fix the company and restore some shareholder value.

But the longer this deliberation goes on, the more we can't help but feeling... we've seen this movie before.